CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Everything is not coming up roses this spring in Chicago after a killer of a cold winter.
You may look at your own yard and, instead of seeing healthy green rosebushes, you may see brown, dead wood.
"Don't feel alone. This is a widespread phenomenon," said Boyce Tankersley, director of Living Plant Documentation at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
"The challenge is, the fact that we went to minus 24 and then we stayed really, really cold for a number of days," he said.
Tankersley said people can cut off the dead wood to just above the green on your rosebushes. And don't give up on seeing blossoms.
"It will produce flowers," he said. "The question is, probably not as many flowers as it has traditionally — and probably won't bloom as long or as heavily."
He said a good many roses have a lot of southern genealogy and are hybridized to live here — but sometimes the southern roots are just too prominent.
Tankersley said when you cut off the dead cane from rosebushes and other plants, do not compost it.
"Dead wood is going to host some diseases that, when the plants are weakened, will transition from eating strictly dead wood to eating weakened tissue," he said. "So we've got some fungi and some bacteria that have that adaptability and we want to remove that food source source so that not anywhere around the plant."